Sukiyaki Western Django (Miike, 2007)

[madali]

Sukiyaki Western Django (Miike, 2007)
IMDB Link

As much as I dislike Takashi Miike, I have to at least acknowledge his productivity. While other well known directors take at least a few years to make a movie, Miike seems to churn out movies at an incredible rate. In IMDB, his first movie seems to have been made in 1991, and his latest movie is in 2009, and between those two, there is a total of 79 works! That is insane.

I can appreciate that part of Miike. He makes movies at an incredibly fast rate and he works in all genres.

The problem though, I suppose, is that because he works so fast and in so many different genres, I don’t necessarily find his works perfected. They always sound interesting and might have a few good things going for it, but ultimately, I’m almost always disappointed.

In “Sukiyaki Western Django”, it could have turned out to be a great movie, but it is mostly ruined. It is Miike’s attempt at a western. The Sukiyaki in the title seems to be a Japanese dish, so it’s Miike’s way of turning the term spaghetti western into Japanese. Everything in the movie is homage and tongue-in-cheek that unfortunately, the movie itself gets lost in the sea of Miike giggling and winking at us. All the Japanese actors talk in English, rather than Japanese. It is a joke, homage to old westerns, and he winks at us by having a cameo by Taratino speaking in exaggerated, bad English. The joke would have been amusing for five minutes, but hearing the characters do that for 2 hours makes the movie suffer. I had to watch it with subtitles to understand what the fuck they were saying, but given that it seemed the actors were talking in a language they could not understand, made a mess of all of the dialogue. Just because it was on purpose and a joke, and had a purpose, does not excuse it for fucking up the movie.

Visually the film was very interesting. Wish someone would have taken over the movie and made it closer to the great South Korean western, “The Good, the Bad, and the Weird”, which worked in all the ways Miike’s didn’t.

3/5

[shariqq]

a cameo by Taratino speaking in exaggerated, bad English.

Was searching for the thread for Django Unchained, and came across this. Re-read it, and lo behold, QT made an appearance in this movie! Now, there's a Django connection...